A Peculiar Reading
by janember
Summary: A month after Miss Peregrine creates the loop, a book falls into existence at their lunch time. They decide to read it and it opens themselves to a future that they may not even want to be apart of.


**A/N: Hey guys, I'm probably not going to be finishing my other stories because my friend recently introduced me to a new series, Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children. The book is fantastic, and even though I'm only on book two, chapter 5, I'm going to be doing a reading the books series because I have not seen any of these. I'm not quite sure if this is aloud, so if any of this gets taken down, I'm sorry. Also, Victor is alive in this fanfiction and I will explain why in the story. Lastly, For those who haven't read the book, still read this. I will have all the text here. Thank you for reading. :)**

 **Disclaimer: I don't own the book Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children, Ransom Riggs does. He is a great author, and I am fairly jealous of him.**

 **Chapter 1, Getting the books.**  
 **3rd Person POV**

One day in the walls of Miss Peregrine's loop, eleven very peculiar children were going about their daily activities. Among them were a pair of petrifying twins, two very strong siblings, a child that could float, while another could control fire to an extant. One could control plants, and another had bees living inside him. One had prophetic dreams, while one could bring back the dead for a brief moment of time and the last has a mouth on the back of her head. All of these children were very peculiar and was living under the care of an ymbryne named Alma Peregrine. Their loop has been open for about two months and they were living a good life so far in their loop.

Currently, all of these children were sat down for lunch at the dining table. As they were waiting for lunch to be served a book fell from the air. Horace, who was sitting quietly before caught the book, because secretly he had been waiting for this to happen since he saw it in his dream last night. The children gave him knowing looks.

"What is it Horace," asked Millard, who was currently naked.

"It is a book called Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children," Horace stated while reading the title.

It was then when Miss Peregrine walked into the room and said, "I thought I told you to keep the books in the study, Horace".

"No Miss Peregrine, the book fell from the air and it looks like it is about us!," Olive exclaimed.

"Well why wouldn't we want to read a book about this boring place? Read about the flowers blooming each day and cooking dinner, Ooh maybe in this book well eat dinner with carrots!," Victor stated with sarcasm.

Miss Peregrine considered it, should she read this with her wards? It could contain information about the future and she did not want her wards to want to leave, but it could be just about this day in this house. She had made her decision a few minutes later.

"We shall gather in the living room and read the book after lunch," Miss Peregrine decided.

Most of the children finished their lunch quickly eager to read the book. Some of the children, namely Victor, who didn't want to read the book, and Enoch, who was going along with his friend. Finally though they finished their food and gathered in the living room with the rest of the children. Victor sat between Bronwyn and Enoch on the second couch.

Emma had a sudden thought, "What if it is about Abe's life?".

"It very well may be Ms. Bloom," stated Miss Peregrine, "Now let us start this reading so we can finish it as quick as possible and get back to our regular routine. Now, I will start off by reading the prologue,".

 **Prologue**

 **I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen.**

"What?" Claire asked, she was confused already.

Miss Peregrine explained, "This person is saying that his life is only normal when he is doing thing that people like us would do. This person is probably a peculiar,".

Claire nodded at this simplified explanation.

 **The first of these came as a terrible shock and, like anything that changes you forever, split my life into halves: Before and After. Like many of the extraordinary things to come, it involved my grandfather, Abraham Portman.**

"Grandfather?! I thought he was in the war." Emma said bitterly, she clearly thought that whoever he had a kid with was not her.

"This is probably in the future Ms. Bloom," Miss Peregrine explained.

 **Growing up, Grandpa Portman was the most fascinating person I knew.**

"Of course it was, Abe was a peculiar," Millard pitched in.

 **He had lived in an orphanage, fought in wars, crossed oceans by steamship and deserts on horseback, performed in circuses, knew everything about guns and self-defense and surviving in the wilderness, and spoke at least three languages that weren't English.**

"Woah he never told us any of this," Olive said in amazement. Enoch silently agreed with her.

 **It all seemed unfathomably exotic to a kid who'd never left Florida, and I begged him to regale me with stories whenever I saw him. He always obliged, telling them like secrets that could be entrusted only to me.**

All the peculiars were silently wondering if they were the stories of Abe's adventures. Miss Peregrine had a gut feeling that she knew which stories these might have been.

 **When I was six I decided that my only chance of having a life half as exciting as Grandpa Portman's was to become an explorer.**

By the end of that line most of the peculiars knew which story he was talking about.

 **He encouraged me by spending afternoons at my side hunched over maps of the world, plotting imaginary expeditions with trails of red pushpins and telling me about the fantastic places I would discover one day.**

"I wonder if we were even on there," Asked Victor sarcastically, but he thought, ' _Who would want to put this place on a map?_ '.

"Of course we were Victor, this is the best thing he found while exploring, he told me so!," Stated Claire knowingly.

 **At home I made my ambitions known by parading around with a cardboard tube held to my eye, shouting, "Land ho!" and "Prepare a landing party!" until my parents shooed me outside.**

All the peculiars laughed.

 **I think they worried that my grandfather would infect me with some incurable dreaminess from which I'd never recover—that these fantasies were somehow inoculating me against more practical ambitions—so one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn't become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered.**

"No, it is scientifically proven that there is a lot of land that hasn't been discovered," Millard revealed.

 **I'd been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.**

All the peculiars sort of felt this way too.

 **I felt even more cheated when I realized that most of Grandpa Portman's best stories couldn't possibly be true. The tallest tales were always about his childhood, like how he was born in Poland but at twelve had been shipped off to a children's home in Wales. When I would ask why he had to leave his parents, his answer was always the same: because the monsters were after him.**

"Wait, he's Abe Portman's grandson and he _doesn't_ believe in us?," Hugh questioned.

 **Poland was simply rotten with them, he said.**

"Poland does have a lot of Hollowgasts," Miss Peregrine said.

 **"What kind of monsters?" I'd ask, wide-eyed. It became a sort of routine. "Awful hunched-over ones with rotting skin and black eyes," he'd say. "And they walked like this!" And he'd shamble after me like an old-time movie monster until I ran away laughing.**

"And that is how you sum up a Hollow for a six-year old," Enoch broke in.

 **Every time he described them he'd toss in some lurid new detail: they stank like putrefying trash; they were invisible except for their shadows; a pack of squirming tentacles lurked inside their mouths and could whip out in an instant and pull you into their powerful jaws.**

Most of the peculiars shivered at the thought of being eaten by a hollowgast.

 **It wasn't long before I had trouble falling asleep, my hyperactive imagination transforming the hiss of tires on wet pavement into labored breathing just outside my window or shadows under the door into twisting gray-black tentacles.**

"And that is why you don't tell a six-year old about a hollow," Emma contradicted to Enoch.

 **I was scared of the monsters but thrilled to imagine my grandfather battling them and surviving to tell the tale.**

"As we all are," Emma said gratefully.

 **More fantastic still were his stories about life in the Welsh children's home.**

"Not to toot our own horns, but I think we are _pret-ty_ fantastic," Hugh proclaimed.

 **It was an enchanted place, he said, designed to keep kids safe from the monsters, on an island where the sun shined every day and nobody ever got sick or died.**

"Well not yet at least, the loop has only been open for a month," Miss Peregrine said. Seeing the childrens' looks she continued," But of course as long as your in my loop, no harm will befall any of you".

 **Everyone lived together in a big house that was protected by a wise old bird—or so the story went. As I got older, though, I began to have doubts.**  
 **"What kind of bird?" I asked him one afternoon at age seven, eyeing him skeptically across the card table where he was letting me win at Monopoly.**  
 **"A big hawk who smoked a pipe," he said.**  
 **"You must think I'm pretty dumb, Grandpa."**

"Knowing Abe he probably doesn't think that," Added Victor.

 **He thumbed through his dwindling stack of orange and blue money. "I would never think that about you, Yakob." I knew I'd offended him because the Polish accent he could never quite shake had come out of hiding, so that would became vood and think became sink.**

"The Polish accent? We only heard that twice before," Put in Claire.

 **Feeling guilty, I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.**  
 **"But why did the monsters want to hurt you?" I asked.**  
 **"Because we weren't like other people. We were peculiar."**

"Yeah, and most of us are proud about it, I know I am," Hugh gloated, chest puffed out in pride.

 **"Peculiar how?"**  
 **"Oh, all sorts of ways," he said. "There was a girl who could fly,**

"That's me!," Olive exclaimed.

 **a boy who had bees living inside him,**

"That is me," Hugh said.

 **a brother and sister who could lift boulders over their heads."**

"Victor, that is us," Bronwyn said, Victor sighed and replied with,

"I know, Bron".

 **It was hard to tell if he was being serious. Then again, my grandfather was not known as a teller of jokes. He frowned, reading the doubt on my face.**

"I do admit, it is easy to doubt someone that says these things," Fiona said out of nowhere. Everyone gave her looks of surprise, Fiona rarely talked.

 **"Fine, you don't have to take my word for it," he said. "I got pictures!"**

"He took the pictures?" Emma asked, surprised.

 **He pushed back his lawn chair and went into the house, leaving me alone on the screened-in lanai. A minute later he came back holding an old cigar box. I leaned in to look as he drew out four wrinkled and yellowing snapshots.**

Everyone was wondering just how long those pictures have been in that box.

 **The first was a blurry picture of what looked like a suit of clothes with no person in them.**

"That is me," Millard said, smiling, even though no one could see him.

 **Either that or the person didn't have a head.**

Millard sounded incredulously, " Of course I have a head, just because I'm invisible-"

"Millard, I'm sure Abe will correct him," Emma said.

Millard sat down still disgruntled and huffing.

 **"Sure, he's got a head!" my grandfather said, grinning. "Only you can't see it."**

Emma said to prove her point, "See?,".

Millard looked satisfied and Miss Peregrine continued.

 **"Why not? Is he invisible?"**  
 **"Hey, look at the brain on this one!" He raised his eyebrows as if I'd surprised him with my powers of deduction. "Millard, his name was. Funny kid. Sometimes he'd say, 'Hey Abe, I know what you did today,' and he'd tell you where you'd been, what you had to eat, if you picked your nose when you thought nobody was looking. Sometimes he'd follow you, quiet as a mouse, with no clothes on so you couldn't see him—just watching!"**

"Yup, that about sums up Millard," Enoch replied amused.

 **He shook his head. "Of all the things, eh?"**  
 **He slipped me another photo. Once I'd had a moment to look at it, he said, "So? What do you see?"**  
 **"A little girl?"**  
 **"And?"**  
 **"She's wearing a crown."**

"That's also me!," Olive screamed in excitement and started jumping on the couch.

"Ms. Elephanta please sit down," Miss Peregrine politely commanded.

 **He tapped the bottom of the picture. "What about her feet?"**  
 **I held the snapshot closer. The girl's feet weren't touching the ground. But she wasn't jumping—she seemed to be floating in the air. My jaw fell open.**  
 **"She's flying!"**  
 **"Close," my grandfather said. "She's levitating. Only she couldn't control herself too well, so sometimes we had to tie a rope around her to keep her from floating away!"**  
 **My eyes were glued to her haunting, doll-like face. "Is it real?"**

"Of course it is," Emma said baffled

 **"Of course it is,"**

Emma blushed.

 **he said gruffly, taking the picture and replacing it with another, this one of a scrawny boy lifting a boulder. "Victor and his sister weren't so smart," he said, "but boy were they strong!"**  
 **"He doesn't look strong," I said, studying the boy's skinny arms.**

"Oi! I take that as offense, my muscle size doesn't define my strength!," Victor yelled. Everyone stared at him in bewilderment, Victor was normally passive.

 **"Trust me, he was. I tried to arm-wrestle him once and he just about tore my hand off!"**

"Like it should be," Victor nodded his approval.

 **But the strangest photo was the last one. It was the back of somebody's head, with a face painted on it.**

Everyone was confused but Miss Peregrine, but she wouldn't tell them who it was.

 **I stared at the last photo as Grandpa Portman explained. "He had two mouths, see? One in the front and one in the back. That's why he got so big and fat!"**  
 **"But it's fake," I said. "The face is just painted on."**  
 **"Sure, the paint's fake. It was for a circus show. But I'm telling you, he had two mouths. You don't believe me?"**  
 **I thought about it, looking at the pictures and then at my grandfather, his face so earnest and open. What reason would he have to lie?**  
 **"I believe you," I said.**

"Of course he did, who wouldn't believe Abe?," Hugh asked the room but got no response in an answer.

 **And I really did believe him—for a few years, at least—though mostly because I wanted to, like other kids my age wanted to believe in Santa Claus. We cling to our fairy tales until the price for believing them becomes too high, which for me was the day in second grade when Robbie Jensen pantsed me at lunch in front of a table of girls and announced that I believed in fairies.**

"We are NOT fairies!," Olive exclaimed in anger, "I just float, I don't have wings".

"It is alright Olive, you are not a fairy, that, I have seen," Horace added with a wink to Olive.

 **It was just deserts, I suppose, for repeating my grandfather's stories at school but in those humiliating seconds I foresaw the moniker "fairy boy" trailing me for years and, rightly or not, I resented him for it.**

"I guess I would too if I got called that," Enoch intoned.

 **Grandpa Portman picked me up from school that afternoon, as he often did when both my parents were working. I climbed into the passenger seat of his old Pontiac and declared that I didn't believe in his fairy stories anymore.**

"If I know Abe any, he is going to be confused," Emma stated.

 **"What fairy stories?" he said, peering at me over his glasses.**  
 **"You know. The stories. About the kids and the monsters."**

"I don't blame the kid, but we are not imaginary," Victor said in an intoned voice.

 **He seemed confused. "Who said anything about fairies?"**

"Oh, we assumed that they were talking about Olive," Said Horace.

 **I told him that a made-up story and a fairy tale were the same thing, and that fairy tales were for pants-wetting babies, and that I knew his photos and stories were fakes.**

"Ouch, hear that guys, were fake apparently," Millard said in a joking manner.

 **I expected him to get mad or put up a fight, but instead he just said, "Okay," and threw the Pontiac into drive. With a stab of his foot on the accelerator we lurched away from the curb. And that was the end of it.**

"So, Abe didn't stand up for us?" Emma asked, hurt.

 **I guess he'd seen it coming—I had to grow out of them eventually—but he dropped the whole thing so quickly it left me feeling like I'd been lied to.**

"Come on Abe, you should have tried at least!," Emma exclaimed.

 **I couldn't understand why he'd made up all that stuff, tricked me into believing that extraordinary things were possible when they weren't.**

Miss Peregrine frowned at that statement.

 **It wasn't until a few years later that my dad explained it to me: Grandpa had told him some of the same stories when he was a kid, and they weren't lies, exactly, but exaggerated versions of the truth—because the story of Grandpa Portman's childhood wasn't a fairy tale at all.**

"Ah see, at least that way he knows we may exist and will come looking for us one day," Horace explained, and all the peculiars grew anxious.

 **It was a horror story.**

"Of course it was, war is always a horror story," Victor said.

 **My grandfather was the only member of his family to escape Poland before the Second World War broke out. He was twelve years old when his parents sent him into the arms of strangers, putting their youngest son on a train to Britain with nothing more than a suitcase and the clothes on his back. It was a one-way ticket.**

"This is exactly what Abe told us and then he..." Emma drifted into her thoughts while talking.

 **He never saw his mother or father again, or his older brothers, his cousins, his aunts and uncles. Each one would be dead before his sixteenth birthday, killed by the monsters he had so narrowly escaped.**

"Poor Abe's family," Olive said and Clair sympathized also.

 **But these weren't the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around—they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don't recognize them for what they are until it's too late.**

Enoch said, "Well in a way the German soldiers are monsters, some of them are wights in disguise,".

 **Like the monsters, the enchanted-island story was also a truth in disguise. Compared to the horrors of mainland Europe, the children's home that had taken in my grandfather must've seemed like a paradise, and so in his stories it had become one: a safe haven of endless summers and guardian angels and magical children, who couldn't really fly or turn invisible or lift boulders, of course.**

It was all the childrens' turn to shake their heads disapprovingly.

 **The peculiarity for which they'd been hunted was simply their Jewishness.**

"Not all of us are Jewish," Hugh said.

 **They were orphans of war, washed up on that little island in a tide of blood. What made them amazing wasn't that they had miraculous powers; that they had escaped the ghettos and gas chambers was miracle enough.**

"I guess that could make sense to a normal in denial," Hugh continued.

 **I stopped asking my grandfather to tell me stories, and I think secretly he was relieved. An air of mystery closed around the details of his early life. I didn't pry. He had been through hell and had a right to his secrets.**

"That makes sense, he did go through hell," Enoch stated.

"Language Mr. O'Conner," Miss Peregrine admonished.

 **I felt ashamed for having been jealous of his life, considering the price he'd paid for it, and I tried to feel lucky for the safe and unextraordinary one that I had done nothing to deserve.**

"You probably have done something to deserve this," Emma said softly. She was starting to feel the same way she had felt to Jacob when she heard Abe's story for the first time. She didn't like this feeling.

 **Then, a few years later, when I was fifteen, an extraordinary and terrible thing happened, and there was only Before and After.**

"That is the end of the Prologue, any final comments children?," Asked Miss Peregrine.

"No," All the children chorused.

"Ok then, I will continue reading," And taking a sip of water she flipped the page, " **Chapter 1** "

 **A/N: Any who, that took a long while. I do hope you enjoyed the first out of thirteen chapters, I will probably up the next chapter at the break of the moon tomorrow. Hope you have a great day, (or night, or afternoon, or morn) -Janember :)**


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